Recently I got a benchmarking table by Quicklogic from an article at EETimes China. It includes almost all sensor hub solutions in markets, such as Sentral's ASSP, STM ARM-M0 based LIS331EB, Freescale's Coldfire based MMA955xl, Atmel's mXF0100, and TI's MSP430 MCUs. It claims its solution achieve lowest power consumption, <1mW. It also boasts the FSM+ALU solution is more energy-efficient thant MCU-based solutions. I am curious how QuickLogic did the benchmarking and calculated the power figures. What kind of typical benchmarking tasks/contexts are used? How it concluded that FSM+ALU is more energy-efficient, as MCU is able to do more complicated tasks maybe required by sensor fusion? Max, could you offer more information? Thanks.

Interestingly, the table didn't include the SiLabs' latest released EFM32 ARM-M0+ based Zero Gecko solution utilizing a combination of low-energy techniques. The power figure I got from Silab is 11.2 uW/MHz at 2.42 CoreMark/MHz.

I agree -- I really think that QuickLogic are in a great position to grab a big share of this market. I also think that there are already far more sensors around us than most of us think -- and that this number is set to see exponential increase in th every near future...

@Max: "The sensor manager is augmented by an ultra-low-power CISC-based arithmetic logic unit for real-time sensor data processing. This, in turn, is augmented by an embedded array of reprogrammable logic."

This is really very interesting!! While most of the market is focusing on off-the-shelf general-purpose RISC cores in order to get low-power control --i.e. low-end ARM--, QuickLogic's solution seems a very smart design decission to me. If the S1 needs to perfom dedicated data processing from its sensors, a CISC ALU with optimized instructions is able to save a good chunk of power consumption by only using the silicon that is actually required by the device.